Paddy the Wanderer

The song of this music video is about an Airedale called Paddy that wandered the Wellington wharves throughout the 1930s in search of Elsie Glasgow, his three & half-year-old owner. Alas though, Elsie had contracted pneumonia and died and poor Paddy, whom she had named Dash, spent the rest of his life searching for her. He was adopted by the harbour board and set to wander the docks at night to keep ‘no-gooders’ at bay. He became well known by the wharfies, and ships’ crews’ that came regularly to the port. He would sometimes slip on board unseen as a ship cast off, and venture across the Pacific and back before the ship docked again, and he could put his feet back on ‘dry’ ground. He died in 1939 – there is a plaque to his memory on Wellington’s Queen’s Wharf.